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Comment by sambeau | Hacker News Reader

I'd like to take this opportunity to remind people of the (sometimes a little forgotten) other person name-checked in the Higgs Boson: Satyendra Nath Bose.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satyendra_Nath_Bose

He was an interesting chap!

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He certainly had an interesting life, but I don't think the person giving their name to half the particles in the universe can be called ‘a little forgotten’.

Ha. True.

But, I'm not sure people know that a Boson is named after him at all and if they do I'd bet they assume (like I once did) that Bose was some German or Hungarian bloke.

(Mind you, I also thought that the Bose of Bose Corporation[1] would have been a European rather than Indian descent, too. Clearly, I have some prejudice I need to work out).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amar_Bose

Also one thing to keep in mind is that there are two eminent Bengali scientists named Bose -- there is of course Satyen Bose but there is also Jagadish Chandra Bose: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jagadish_Chandra_Bose

That's funny because "böse" in German means "evil" or "nasty". I don't know if anybody has that surname, but I would suspect not.

Wikipedia mentions a couple of ‘von Bose’, and I have to admit that I don’t see any particularly tight link between ‘Bose’ and ‘böse’ – the umlaut does have a special pronunciation, after all.

Good point, I guess native German speakers are better at forming that distinction automatically, whereas umlaut-free language speakers probably have a harder time of it.

That's funny because in the US, "bose" means crappy speakers with big marketing budget.

It's probably worth bringing up a couple other famous Indian scientists such as Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, Srinivasa Ramanujan, and Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman. These three folks have made major contributions to science and mathematics, in the same league as, say, Heisenberg, Bohr, or Riemann. And even though there are important phenomena or properties named after them (e.g. Raman spectroscopy, Chandrasekhar limit, etc.) as people they are far, far less well known than European scientists.

I don't think those 3 are any less well-known than other physicists and mathematicians of similar accomplishments. Ramanujan, in particular, because of his romantic story, is far more well known than his influence might suggest. His intellect might well have been the equal of Riemann's, but one can't honestly say his contributions even approach Riemann's. The same goes for the the physicists - Bohr was one of the three or four most important physicists of the last century, and Heisenberg was one of the top 10, probably.

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